TV review: Spooks and Unequal Opportunities

As watchable and implausible as ever ... Richard Armitage as as Lucas, Peter Firth as Harry in Spooks. Photograph: BBC/Kudos/Kudos

Thank you, thank you, thank you. At last, after merely the odd glimmer of a quality programme over the last couple of weeks, we've finally had a whole night of worthwhile viewing. A night when the Sky+ box comes into its own. A night when you don't have to look out of the window into the darkness at eight o'clock and feel like killing yourself.

The highlight of the night – and any other night, come to think of it – was the start of the ninth series of Spooks (BBC1) which is still as compellingly watchable and implausible as ever. I say implausible, but then you never really know. When a real-life MI6 officer turns up dead inside a sports bag, in his London flat, who is to say that seeing the wonderful Ros Myers (Hermione Norris) taken out at the end of the last series by a hotel bomb while trying to save a government minister is unthinkable? You just hope the rate of attrition in the real security services is lower than in Spooks; getting a job on this show is not a long-term career move for an actor. Unless you're Peter Firth, playing MI5 boss Harry Pearce.

Poor old Ros. The show began with her funeral, to which just six people came. This was intended to show the loneliness of the long distance spy, but what it really highlighted was that no Spooks fans had been invited. If we had, she'd have got a bigger crowd than the pope. Anyway, no sooner was Ros six feet under than Harry proposed to Ruth. Ruth turned him down while telling him that Ros's death had been ordered by the previous home secretary who had been a spy for Nightingale, whereupon Harry decamped to Scotland to poison him with a 30-year-old malt whisky. It was a mini-Shakespearean tragedy in its own right, and all before the opening credits.

But as one door closes another opens, so it wasn't long before Lucas, our last remaining field operative, teamed up with Beth Bailey, an undercover private agent posing as an east European hooker (don't ask). Beth looks set to join MI5, but for how long is anyone's guess. Their aim was to thwart an al-Qaida attack on London by two submersibles in the Thames. Harry delivered the coup de grâce by switching on the electro-magnetic pulse machine under parliament – I bet you didn't know it was there either – and taking out the submersibles, along with nine bystanders who had their pacemakers short-circuited. At one point Harry said, "Does it ever stop, Ruth?" I sincerely hope not.

Equally as watchable in its own way was Unequal Opportunities (BBC2). John Humphrys seems to get up a lot of people's noses. Too grumpy, too opinionated. Personally, I rather like a bit of grumpiness and someone unafraid to speak their mind, so I've always had a soft spot for him. Here he was ferreting around the education system, asking the key awkward question that has defeated all politicians since the second world war: how can we put an end to the attainment gap that ensures a thick middle-class kid will almost always end up doing better than a clever working-class kid?

This was never going to be a programme that offered any easy answers. Let's face it, if there were any, someone might have come up with them by now, because what is at work here is the middle class's ability to manipulate any system to its own advantage and – as every politician knows – it is the kiss of death at the polls to interfere. So what we get is a range of sticking-plaster measures, such as Teach First, basically community service volunteering for high-flying graduates, and the academies programme, which merely diverts cash from neighbouring schools. Neither fools Humphrys.

My guess is that at some stage Humphrys' producer told him he should try to end on a positive note, so he closed with the vaguely optimistic idea that leadership is key, and that if all schools were run as well as Phoenix High in west London, we would see a gradual improvement. Possibly so, though personally I'd want to check that its neighbouring schools hadn't gone into decline. When the middle classes are at work in the education system, the playing field seldom remains level.

All this and The Photographer: Storyville (BBC4), a harrowingly understated film of the Lodz ghetto, seen through the dual lenses of a German accountant more concerned with the quality of his Agfa film than anything else, and Arnold Mostowicz, the last Jewish survivor, plus the ever-dependable University Challenge (BBC2). Does life get much better?

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